John Armstrong was born in 1893 in Hastings. He studied at St. John’s College, Oxford, 1912-13, and then at St. John’s Wood School of Art 1913-14. During the war he served in the Royal Field Artillery 1914-19, before briefly returning to St. John’s Wood School. He began his professional career as a theatre designer in London, gaining important patrons including Lillian and Samuel Courtauld, who commissioned Armstrong to decorate a room in their Portman Square home. His first solo exhibition was at the Leicester Galleries in 1928. In 1933 he joined Unit One alongside Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash, Edward Burra, Henry Moore, Edward Wadsworth, John Bigge and Barbara Hepworth, with whom he exhibited at the Unit One exhibition. From the early 1930s onwards his work became Surrealist in style – uncanny, romantically dream-like and heavily imbued with symbolism. Armstrong died in 1973. His work is held in numerous international public collections including the Tate, the Imperial War Museum, the National Galleries of Scotland, and the National Gallery of Australia.

Armstrong explored enigmatic interactions and configurations between leaf and feather figures in the ‘Embrace’ series with works such as Leaf Forms. One upright leaf, no longer a leaf-feather hybrid but recognisably a decaying brown leaf, stands, an austere figure, on a rocky bank above three prostrate leaf companions. The religious insinuation of some titles of the ‘Embrace’ works – Armstrong’s titles are often less ambiguous than the paintings themselves – is here, as with the closely related Transfiguration, 1947, reflected by the imagery. The pose of the outstretched primary leaf, near human in its stance, is palpably reminiscent of a crucifixion scene.

As with Armstrong’s other morphological works, instigated by the profusion of exotic and overgrown flora in Lamorna, there is a sinister eeriness latent within Leaf Form. The ability of nature to reclaim what was once its own is a continual theme throughout British Surrealist Ithell Colquhoun’s book Stones of Cornwall. Each layer of history is devoured by the wilderness of Lamorna so that only relics and memories remain. Armstrong’s anthropomorphic paintings prefigure the earliest science fiction novels of the 1960s concerned with nature wreaking its revenge on the human race. Often set in dystopian post-nuclear apocalypse worlds, the natural environment can no longer be exploited by the human race but becomes dangerous, an indestructible enemy. Novels by J.G. Ballard, the acknowledged master of this genre, frequently centre on a major environmental change resulting in nature mutating into the aggressor of the human race.

Bold in composition, Leaf Forms is dramatically powerful, yet sustained attention reveals an exquisite subtlety in colour and suggestion in meaning. The standing leaf seems defiant in the face of the advancing, crawling trio below. Theatrical, near spot-lit, lighting, casts deep shadows across the picture, suggesting a setting sun to the right of the picture frame. The stark lighting accentuates the sculptural solidity of the leaves: Armstrong picks out delicate touches of shadow on the upright leaf, cast by its own veining. This leaf is brittle, perhaps even fragile in curious juxtaposition to the menacing sturdiness of the prostrate leaves with prominent veining. With its sculptural monumentality, intense lighting, uncanny anthropomorphism, and elusive relationship amongst the leaves, Leaf Forms is Armstrong at the zenith of his Lamorna phase.